1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the internet/website field and more specifically relates to measuring the speed and reliability of the delivery of websites to end users (website performance monitoring); quantifying how many visitors a website receives, what pages they visit on a website, and the monetary value of each user visit (website analytics monitoring); and the general health of the applications which the website runs (application health monitoring).
2. Related Art
Conventional website performance monitoring solutions address the need for web enabled businesses to measure the speed and reliability of their websites as seen by a global audience accessing them over the internet. Conventional website analytics monitoring solutions address the need for web enabled businesses to understand how much traffic they are getting and the end users' behavior once they arrive at the website. These conventional systems may also calculate how much money a website generates by tracking the value of purchases via the website.
Conventional back end application health monitoring solutions address the need for web enabled businesses to understand how well their shrink-wrapped back end applications are standing up to day to day load levels. Each back end application has its own metrics that need to be monitored, for example one would monitor CPU, Memory or Swap space usage on Linux or Windows Operating System applications. Another example would be monitoring the memory usage or requests per second of the Oracle database application.
These conventional disparate systems lack the ability to correlate the cause and effect of website performance, website analytics and application health on each other. These conventional disparate systems generate data results that reflect what is specifically measured by the particular system, leaving the website owner to make sense of the disparate data results generated by the disparate systems. These conventional disparate systems lack the ability to draw intelligent conclusions about the cause and effect relationships. Since these conventional systems can not determine the cause and effect relationship between each other, they also can not determine the cost of website performance slowdowns or back and application health to the website owner. Therefore what is needed is a system and method that overcomes these significant problems found in the conventional systems as described above.